Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Uncle Oscar

Today is the birthday of our dear Uncle Oscar.

Oscar was brilliant, but had a bit of unpleasantness in his life after he became involved with a member of the Douglas family. Everyone knew the Douglas clan was a bit well, off-kilter. I mean really, the young man in question, 21 at the time he met Uncle Oscar, was nicknamed "Bosie" by his own mother! Bosie's father was pugilistically inclined and often threatened to beat people with a horse whip (and probably did), his Uncle was in love with his twin sister and after she married someone else kidnapped a young woman, another aunt was a suffragette, oh, the things that went on in that family!

At any rate, his relationship with Bosie proved to be Uncle Oscar's undoing. Uncle was packed off for two years of hard labor which basically destroyed him. Just three years after his time away, Uncle Oscar died in Paris, destitute, at the age of 46.

It was all so sad, Uncle had been such a brave man - he was the only well known author to sign George Bernard Shaw's petition to pardon the anarchists who had been arrested and were being being blamed for a riot in Chicago's Haymarket Square (they were later executed).

In his day, he was a well known author, playwright, poet, and lecturer (according to reports, he was particularly well received by cowboys in the old American West!)

I've collected just a few of my favorites of Uncle Oscar's comments as my way of remembering him today. Sadly, I've no time to do this right as I must go off to toil in the fields of Mammon.

It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about, nowadays, saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true.
-- “The Picture of Dorian Gray”

People who count their chickens before they are hatched, act very wisely, because chickens run about so absurdly that it is impossible to count them accurately.
-- Letter from Paris, dated May 1900

The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.
-- “Lord Arthur Savile's Crime”

Young men want to be faithful and are not; old men want to be faithless and cannot.
-- “The Picture of Dorian Gray”

Austan - 'Bosie' was Lord Alfred's mother's version of "Boysie", which was a popular male name in the late 1800's. No special connotation that I know of, but it's a hell of a moniker to slap on a kid - "Bosie". Sounds like a cow kept at Boarding school.